Pakistan’s
US-Backed
Dictator Lashes Out
By Keith Jones &
Vilani Peiris
10 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
An air of violence and desperation
surrounds Pakistan’s US-backed military regime.
Having failed to intimidate
the populace by orchestrating violent attacks in Karachi on the weekend
of May 12-13 that left more than 40 people dead, the regime of General
Pervez Musharraf has lashed out with new repressive measures and threats.
These include “preventative arrests” and a raft of regulations
aimed at intimidating the press and silencing dissent.
An emergency meeting June
1 of the Pakistan Army’s corps commanders and principal staff
officers declared full support for Musharraf, who doubles as Pakistan’s
president and Chief of Armed Services. According to a statement from
the Inter-Services Public Relations bureau, “The conference took
note of the malicious campaign against institutions of the state, launched
by vested interests and opportunists who are acting as obstructionist
forces to serve their personal interests and agenda even at the cost
of flouting the law.”
Subsequently, Chaudhary Shujat
Hussain—Musharraf’s former prime minister and the current
president of the most important political grouping that supports the
general-president—charged that there is a campaign to malign the
armed forces and that those involved in this campaign are “agents
of RAW” (the secret police of Pakistan’s arch-rival India)
and “should be treated as traitors.”
Last weekend private television
stations were barred from broadcasting programs or televising discussions
that touched on the controversy surrounding Musharraf’s attempt
to remove Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on trumped-up corruption
charges. (Chaudhry’s real crime is that he issued a number of
rulings that cut across the government’s agenda, particularly
in respect to the fire-sale of Pakistan Steel Mills and the disappearances
of alleged terrorist suspects, causing Musharraf to doubt whether he
could be relied on to rubber-stamp a phony presidential election this
fall.)
Then on Monday the government
gave the state regulator of broadcasting (PEMRA) sweeping new powers
to issue ordinances governing the electronic media and to cancel the
licenses, seize the equipment and seal the premises of broadcasters
who violate its edicts.
“It’s a repressive
law,” Talaat Hussein, Aaj TV’s director of news told the
BBC. “It’s very clear that the government does not want
any visuals on the TV screens which are against its policies.”
The government has accused
private television stations of fomenting opposition and of allowing
the broadcasts of statements and images that are disrespectful to the
army and judiciary. As Peter Goodspeed, a foreign correspondent with
Canada’s National Post, noted, Pakistan’s generals are “said
to be infuriated by film that showed tens of thousands of people shouting
‘Musharraf is a dog!’ and ‘The generals are traitors’
outside the Supreme Court.”
The media restrictions have
been coupled with a campaign of intimidation against journalists. According
to a New York Times report, Hamid Mir, an announcer at GEO Television,
has decided to send his family abroad “because of threats and
because his children [have been] followed to school.”
In the face of a public outcry,
the government backed off slightly Thursday. After a meeting with representatives
of the press and broadcasters, Prime Minster Shaukat Aziz announced
that PEMRA’s new powers have been suspended pending a governmental
review.
Perhaps the military calculates
that the media has gotten the message and will self-censor its reporting
on the opposition movement; perhaps it intends to refine the regulations
to make them a less flagrant attack on the rights of the press.
What is indubitable is that
the Musharraf regime stands ready to unleash the security forces and
military against the Pakistani people. On Wednesday and Thursday security
forces took hundreds of opposition activists into preventative detention
in a vain attempt to stop anti-government demonstrations in Lahore,
Islamabad and other cities.
The strength of the opposition
movement has caused fissures in the regime, with the various political
groupings hitherto loyal to Musharraf attacking each other for their
respective roles in Musharraf’s decision to sack the chief justice
and the Karachi bloodbath.
As for the general himself,
he has become increasingly critical of his political cronies for failing
to rally popular support for his government’s policies—a
close partnership with US imperialism, privatization and other pro-investor
measures, and various concessions to the religious right.
According to yesterday’s
edition of the (Pakistan) News, Musharraf denounced the parliamentary
deputies of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) when he met with them Wednesday.
Reported the News, “President General Pervez Musharraf on Wednesday
blasted the ruling coalition, especially the Pakistan Muslim League
leadership and the lawmakers for ‘always leaving him in the lurch’
and said the country would be in deep trouble if his set-up got changed.”
The News further reported
Musharraf as saying that of a thousand political appointees he could
not even count on ten to speak in his defence: “I bluntly say
that you always leave me alone in the time of trial and tribulation.
Whether it was a change in the Afghan policy, Dr. A.Q Khan and Bugti
issues, the judicial crisis or the May 12 incident, you never came to
my support.”
There is growing concern
in Western capitals, which for the past eight years have steadfastly
supported the Musharraf dictatorship, that the Pakistani regime is unraveling
and, hence, growing calls for intervention to broker a deal between
the military and the bourgeois opposition.
But the Bush administration
remains adamant in its policy of unequivocal support for Musharraf,
whom it has repeatedly proclaimed a key ally in the “war on terror.”
Speaking Monday, US State Department official Sean McCormack again solidarized
the US government with Pakistan’s military dictatorship: “[W]hat
everybody wants to see: a more politically stable, more open, a more
economically prosperous Pakistan. And that’s—that is the
program that President Musharraf’s government has laid out. And
we support that, we encourage that. There’s a lot at stake, certainly.
Pakistan is an important country in a very important region that has
not known a lot of stability ... So the steps that the Pakistani government
are—have taken over the past several years, we believe are generally
in the right direction and we want to encourage them.”
Apart from Washington’s
backing, the other key factor in Musharraf’s survival to date
is the bourgeois opposition’s complicity with the military and
fear of the masses.
The alliance of the religious
parties, the MMA, to this day rules the North-West Frontier Province
under Musharraf and in Baluchistan it is in a governing coalition with
the pro-Musharraf PML (Q). Nawaz Sharif, having been deposed as prime
minister by Musharraf, is an indefatigable opponent of the general-president.
But this industrialist and frequent ally of the religious right owes
his political career, if not his business fortune, to his ties to the
military establishment and government bureaucracy.
As for Benazir Bhutto and
her Pakistan People’s Party, while they posture as progressives
and even socialists, their orientation is toward winning Washington’s
backing by vowing to be serve US interests even more faithfully than
the current government, and toward making a deal with the military,
if not the hated Musharraf himself.
In an interview with the
New York Times this week, Bhutto again suggested she would be willing
to work with the general if he gives up his post as military chief.
“The fact that he was ready to engage with the PPP was positive,”
Bhutto told the Times, “I think he toyed with the idea of moderate
forces getting together.”
Bhutto has sought to justify
a deal with Musharraf on the grounds of opposing the religious right
Yet Musharraf himself has repeatedly connived with and bowed to the
religious right and it is his reactionary alliance with Washington and
socially incendiary neo-liberal economic policies that have provided
a political climate in which the Islamic fundamentalists can pose as
defender of the people’s interests.
Bhutto told the Times that
she much preferred a deal with the military over a popular upsurge against
the dictatorship: “If the streets hold sway, then it is anyone’s
guess who actually captures the movement.”
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